By Amy Worden and Kathleen Brady Shea
The Philadelphia Inquirer
HARRISBURG, Pa. — If a test vehicle is blown up in the remote reaches of central Pennsylvania and nobody hears it, did it really explode?
In what was truly a secret operation - kept under wraps from even Gov. Rendell and various state and federal law enforcement agencies — the FBI rigged a replica SUV with explosives at a still-undisclosed location about 30 miles from State College, and detonated it to simulate what would have happened had the car bomb exploded in Times Square.
Investigators believe the late-June test revealed that the homemade fertilizer bomb would have killed untold numbers of people in the heart of New York.
But in conducting a test that involved re-creating a Manhattan street scene in rural Pennsylvania, the agency apparently did not notify any state or local authorities.
Officials in Centre County, where State College is, said they didn’t know about the test. Then again, no one is saying exactly where outside State College the test occurred. So it could have been in an adjacent county.
Asked Wednesday morning if he had heard about the June test, Rendell told The Inquirer that he had not.
Nor did he seem especially irked about being kept in the dark.
“There’s probably not a law against blowing up a vehicle on private property, presuming it didn’t hurt anyone,” Rendell said after testifying before the state Senate Transportation Committee about Pennsylvania’s need for new sources of transportation funding.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Philadelphia FBI office said they, too, knew nothing about the blast. Neither did the state police or the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, which generally works closely with the FBI, officials said.
“We don’t know anything about that,” PEMA spokeswoman Ruth Miller said, replying to a request for information.
The FBI’s New York office declined to comment.
Several Centre County officials noted that FBI and ATF investigators sometimes had used the region’s numerous gravel and asphalt quarries for explosives tests.
FBI officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that investigators had used a Nissan Pathfinder, the same model that was found emitting smoke on a side street off Times Square on May 1 — and rigged it with a higher-grade fertilizer and more sophisticated components.
Four other vehicles were placed around the bomb-rigged Pathfinder in an effort to replicate the parked cars and passing traffic, the AP reported.
The explosion cut the SUV in half, officials told the AP. It turned the adjacent car into a flaming wreck, sending it airborne for a distance that in Times Square would have vaulted it across the street, over a parked car, and into the New York Marriott Marquis hotel.
Two other cars were left in one fiery, tangled wreck in the middle of the mock street, officials said. They said a video of the explosion had been played for a group of investigators this week.
Dan Surra, a former state legislator who is Rendell’s senior adviser on the upstate Pennsylvania Wilds tourism region, said he was surprised the FBI hadn’t told anyone in the state government.
“You shocked the hell out of me,” said Surra, who represented Clearfield County, which abuts Centre County and could have been the site of the tests. “It’s more disturbing that they didn’t tell anyone than the fact they did it.”
A spokesman for Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre) — the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, the official who traditionally chairs PEMA — said he didn’t take issue with the FBI’s hush-hush posture.
“Our office was unaware of it, but I don’t think we would have been informed,” said Tor Michaels, Conklin’s chief of staff. “There are remote places, so such a test could take place without harm to the public. And if it helps learn more about preventing terrorism and keeping us safe, that’s a good thing.”
Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American, is in federal custody in New York after pleading guilty last month to charges related to the Times Square plot.
He told authorities that the bomb was supposed to explode within five minutes after he walked away. Instead, the explosives released only a stream of smoke that attracted the attention of a street vendor, who notified police.
Federal agents arrested Shahzad two days later as he tried to flee the country on a Dubai-bound jet.
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